Aroma of home

IT'S A SATURDAY morning around 10 at the Colombian Bakery, and Angela Benitez could use another set of hands. Customers are lined up to the door in this tiny storefront, which serves authentic Colombian and Mexican breads and pastries to a largely Hispanic clientele.

Benitez, a Colombian native, has worked at the bakery since it opened five years ago. And business is good. A tray of warm triangles of puffed pastry stuffed with cream cheese and guava makes it to the counter, but barely. With most items priced between $1 and $3, and the coffee as dark, strong and potent as you might imagine, breakfast hours are a busy time here.

Benitez works efficiently, smiling brightly and calling most of her customers by name or amor ("love" in Spanish).

The atmosphere is warm and convivial, and the customers seem to hail from all walks of life, from landscapers and contractors to business people sitting at tables in the back with their breakfasts reading Spanish-language newspapers amid all the hubbub. A happy toddler with a smear of guava jelly on her face wanders underfoot.

"This is a place where good manners still exist and people say hello to one another when they walk in and goodbye when they leave," said a regular customer, Alejandro Alvarez, a Daily News photographer and first-generation Mexican-American. "It's not about the fast-paced, American way of living, about hurrying people up and getting them out of the way. This place is special because it's as much about being Hispanic, about being part of a community, as it as about coffee and pastry."

Carolina Torres, who moved to Philadelphia from Cali, Colombia, used to make her own pastries at home. "But now everyone works so much, I don't have time. I go to the bakery to buy bread and pastry, and to socialize. It's important to the life of the community."

In 2007, Philadelphia's Hispanic population is certainly higher than the 8.5 percent listed in 2004 census numbers. Nationwide, Hispanics represent one out of eight Americans, a number estimated to become one in four by mid-century.

The proliferation of Latino bakeries around the city is certainly representative of that shift. Even Tastykake, the biggest name in local baked goods, has gotten in on the action, offering Tastykake Tropical Delights snack cakes in select Hispanic markets.

Always a city that loved its pastry and bread, Philadelphia has a baking tradition that long followed the German and Italian models. But the mom-and-pop bakery seems to be an endangered species, replaced by corporate chains stocking pastries that look pretty good but somehow taste lackluster.

Finding home-style baked goods on a weekend morning is not as easy as it used to be.

"I think we go to these bakeries to have tastes of our childhood," said Jose Garces, an Ecuadorian-American chef and owner of Amada and Tinto restaurants.

Garces, who lived in Quito, Ecuador, during his childhood, remembers vividly the almost daily visits to the local bakery with his mother.

"We would get fresh bread every day, and there was always a line out to the corner. That's just how everyone started their day."

Even now, Garces asks his mother to make pan de yucca, a type of savory cheese bread made with yucca flour. "It is a way to connect to our culture, even when our lives have changed in other ways."

Garces divides Latino bakery traditions into three basic categories: Mexican, Colombian and Cuban.

Mexican style emphasizes sweeter breads with big egg crusts, and on rich cakes, often filled with flavored creams.

The Colombian school of baking includes some fried breads, such as pandebono, along with baked goods made with corn, puffed pastries, guava paste and cheese fillings, and savory empanadas or arepas, also made with corn.

Cuban-style specializes in pastilles, different shapes of puffed pastry filled with guava, cream cheese, coconut and spiced ground beef. "My wife is Cuban, and every time her parents come from Miami, they bring us a big box of authentic Cuban pastilles, which I haven't been able to find around here," Garces said.

"In my country, we bake with ingredients that we have around us - tropical fruits, coconut milk, chocolate," said Max Baez Berg, a longtime maitre'd from the Dominican Republic. His mother taught cooking in Santo Domingo, and he remembers helping her mix pastry crème and cake batters.

Baez Berg, who works at Gioia Mia on Sansom Street, is an accomplished baker himself, providing special-occasion cakes and pastries to friends and customers. When he wants a taste of home, he replicates recipes from his well-worn copy of "La Cocina Dominicana," written by a classmate of his mother's, Ligia de Bornia, in 1959.

"It's the love you put into it that makes it taste good," he said.

Back at the Colombian Bakery, the steady stream of customers continues. Two cases hold freshly baked Mexican and Colombian specialties such as pandebono, buñuelos and pastel de guayaba, the turnoverlike treat filled with guava jam.

Light and fluffy bunuelos look like doughnut holes, and cuernos de azuca are croissants thickly dusted with sugar.

In the window, a heated glass case holds chunks of grilled chorizo sausage, along with papas rellenas - filled potato croquettes - and crispy corn empanadas with chicken or meat - best eaten with salsa picante.

Refrigerated cases in the back of the store brim with beverages such as Pony Malta, a Colombian malted soda, and kumis, a sweet-and-sour yogurt milk.

Colombian souvenirs, flags from Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico as well as travel posters of Colombian sites and cities adorn the walls. A salsa soundtrack keeps a steady beat as the morning turns into afternoon.

"We're getting more Americans coming in all the time," said Benitez. "I think once they taste Colombian pastries, they feel a little Colombian themselves." *